vCenter Discovery

[Sanket Shinde2]

Hello All,

I learnt that discovery automatically triggers a probe for vCenter discovery when it finds that some Windows machine has vCenter application/software installed on it.

On the same lines I have a few questions:

For example:

1. I have a vCenter instance available in the CMDB, how can I figure out which Windows machine has a particular instance of vCenter installed on it, so that I can run a discovery on that particular machine and get the details of all the datacenters, clusters, ESX Servers and VM instances.

Also, I found out that VMWare has a vCenter web app also. So how to figure out whether the vCenter is istalled on a Windows machine or was discovered from web app?

2.I see even in Orlando release, ServiceNow uses a probe for vCenter discovery and there is no pattern available.How can I get all the information that is available for VM instances in the probe and will it be wise to customize this OOTB probe keeping in mind the automatic upgrade of probes from ServiceNow.

3. How can I fetch additional details about a VM instance which already is not available OOTB.

For example:

If we add a field to VM instance machine table and we want value in the field to be auto-populated through discovery?

Please let me know if you have any information on the above queries.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Sanket Shinde

[khadija3]

Hello,

Discovery runs the vCenter probe when it detect that there is a vCenter process running on a vm, so I would say maybe you need to check that

if you have access to the nowLearning there is a good demo of VMWare discovery that I recommend

https://nowlearning.service-now.com/lxp?id=overview&sys_id=9ac281de1b95c050d540b912cd4bcbca&type=cou...

Cheers

[Sanket Shinde2]

Thank you, Khadija for your response.

I saw the VMWare discovery demo on NowLearning, but it's on Cloud vCenter and in our environment we do not have it on Cloud. Also it shows that they are discovering the datacenters to discover the vcenter instances, which kinda confused me more, I assume in cloud environment they discover datacenters first. 

I followed this video, in which the person is discovering the windows machine to get all the vcenter related data. Below is the link of the video.

https://vimeo.com/85407640 

[Ashutosh Munot1]

Hi,

See response below:

1. I have a vCenter instance available in the CMDB, how can I figure out which Windows machine has a particular instance of vCenter installed on it, so that I can run a discovery on that particular machine and get the details of all the datacenters, clusters, ESX Servers and VM instances. Check the relationship

Also the IP address of the SDK can tell you the this.

Also, I found out that VMWare has a vCenter web app also. So how to figure out whether the vCenter is istalled on a Windows machine or was discovered from web app? Discovery only supports vmapp discovery and not web app for now.

2.I see even in Orlando release, ServiceNow uses a probe for vCenter discovery and there is no pattern available.How can I get all the information that is available for VM instances in the probe and will it be wise to customize this OOTB probe keeping in mind the automatic upgrade of probes from ServiceNow. You can modify probe but you need to maintain it and you will get collisions when you upgrade it. data collected is below

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/orlando-it-operations-management/page/product/discovery/reference...

3. How can I fetch additional details about a VM instance which already is not available OOTB.

For example:

If we add a field to VM instance machine table and we want value in the field to be auto-populated through discovery?

You need to modify the probe to bring that data.

Thanks,
Ashtosh

[Sanket Shinde2]

Thank you, Ashutosh for the response.

The relationship and the ip on the url was the first things I checked, but I think there I could not see any relationships, as the vCenter in our environment is either installed on a VDI (virtual machine) or a linux server, which again is a virtual linux server created from the same vCenter.

I saw this video where the author is discovering the Server/machine to discover all the components of vcenter.

Link -> https://vimeo.com/85407640 

• In case 1, where vcenter is installed on a VM instance :

I am wondering, how this discovery was possible at the first place, because VM data comes only after we discover or when VM probe runs and a vCenter device is discovered and if there is no VM machine, how was the vcenter data populated? 

• In case 2, where vcenter is installed on a Linux Server : 

I tried running a quick discovery on the IP address, which is same for vcenter and linux server. So my expectation was that discovery will give me atleast 2 devices (Linux Server and vCenter as per the above video), but to my surprise it gave only 1 device, which was the vCenter device and after checking the logs, I found that the Linux Server probe was never triggered, can you help me understand why this is happening?

My apologies that I am asking so many questions, but due to my limited knowledge on the topic, I am getting stuck at many places.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Sanket